Isaiah 61:11

Isaiah 61:11

Just as incredible as spring is to winter, as life is to death, is the summer splendour that shall one day mantle this sad world, this sad universe, to the darkness and drearihood of its present winter and night.

I. Consider the concords of the natural and the human worlds. The worlds are one; the Author is one; the life is one. Nature fits man as a dress the body. Man is the mould on which, as a garment, nature is fashioned. Isaiah had a keen eye for this unity. His prophecies are full of imaginative revelations of the likeness between the ways of God in nature and in man. The future of the world, of the universe, unfolded itself before him, as the outburst of a glorious spring a spring which should know no autumn, a dawn that should never darken into night.

II. The winter of life and of the world. All that we look upon, all that strains our pity, oppresses our sympathy, saddens our heart and kills our hope, to the prophet's eye was but as the earth in winter bare, bleak, stern, cold, dark, storm-beaten, frost-nipped, a wilderness of desolation, a waste of death. It is winter; and winter, let us understand, it will be yet. But in our dark despondent moods we entrench ourselves in the promise, "The Lord God shall cause righteousness and praise to spring forth before all the nations."

III. The certainty of a future everlasting spring. The law reigns throughout all the spheres, that light shall burst out of darkness, spring out of winter, life out of death. To an intelligent eye winter is not all desolation. There is a prophecy in every shrinking bud and blade. There is a living thing shining faintly under the pall. Those see it most whose hearts are most attuned to sympathy with the patience and the hope of God. There is more good in the worst heart than any of us dare credit. There is more seed springing under the hard dead crust of winter than any of us dare dream.

J. Baldwin Brown, Christian World Pulpit,vol. vi., p. 111.

Reference: Isaiah 61:11. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xix., No. 1104.